Use dictionary to store mapped columns instead of property

miragejb · **Posted:** Wed Mar 04, 2009 11:07 pm

Does anyone out there know how to do the following?

I would like to store values retrieved from the database with NHibernate in a dictionary instead of using a class properties. For example, let's say we have a table Employee with three fields: Id, FirstName, and LastName.

I would like to have a class as follows:

Code:

public class Employee
{
    private Int64 _id;

    public Int64 Id
    {
        get { return _id; }
        set { _id = value; }
    }
    private IDictionary<String, Object> _properties;
    public IDictionary<String, Object> Properties
    {
        get { return _properties; }
        set { _properties = value; }
    }
    public void AddProperty(String keyName, Object value)
    {
        _properties.Add(keyName, value);
    }

    public Object GetProperty(String keyName)
    {
        return _properties[keyName];
    }
}

Then, I would like for NHibernate, when retrieving/persisting the data, I would like for NHibernate to call methods (or some means) like AddProperty/GetProperty to add the values to the dictionary using the column name as the key.

Is this possible? What I am trying to accomplish is providing a generic class that doesn't need to be compiled everytime a property is added.

Thanks-in-advance.

wolli · **Posted:** Thu Mar 05, 2009 7:56 am

The closest thing hibernate offers here are dynamic-components:

http://www.nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/index.html#components-dynamic

Documentation is very brief about it and I benver used it, so I can't give you more. But maybe Google can help.